She woke up that morning with a burning sensation in her heart, the feeling that if she were to leap in the dark, nobody would rescue her, let alone herself. Maybe she did not have the strength and willpower she showed to the world. In photographs she always seemed so self-confident; but had a painter made an oil portrait of her, he would have most certainly revealed the fragmented bits and pieces of the soul hiding behind the façade of her perfect figure.
It had been two days now since AJ had dumped her for her best friend ever, Bette. "A mere repetition of what happened twenty-five years ago," she told herself. Except that twenty-five years ago, he had left her for her second best friend Elaine and that someone else was there to put the broken pieces of her heart together: Gregory. But today, happily married as he was to Annie, it seemed that he had other ambitions than seducing his ex-wife. It was bad enough that he had divorced her after her miscarriage of one year ago and fled to Las Vegas with Miss Douglas for the Liberty Corporation's sake.
In hindsight she realized that she had not really cared about her ex's re-marriage because she had had AJ and his soothing words and gestures to keep her mind off dreadful thoughts. She had trusted the man enough to start what is often referred to as a "steady relationship" and for a few months she had been really happy. She had let him enter her head, heart and skin for the second time and she could not see one good reason why he would break them again. But he did. And the most painful consideration was that she had not even noticed the slap coming to her face.
AJ dumped her after she saw him kiss Bette in the beach house. He did not even try to apologize; the only thing he mentioned was that things would never be as they used to be before Gregory threw him out of Sunset Beach. "Gregory has changed you so much" was the chief argument of his monologue against her. But what she had really felt at that precise moment was that he had wanted what Gregory had had for so long – her – , as though M. Deschanel wanted to prove to the man who-ruled-the-town-his-own-father-built that he was still up to scratch. "Well obviously, the scratch was meant to rip my heart up," she bitterly reflected. Faithful to himself and stereotypes, AJ had used the old cliché of ditching her as though she had been a mere tissue, very useful for a while but ultimately disposable.
She did not resent her best friend though; deep down Olivia had always probed Ms Katzen-something's feelings for Armando Deschanel Junior. Had AJ fallen for Bette, she would not have married seven men. Her marriages had been a quest for the AJ buried in each hunk she met, with none of them being the wiser.
Olivia had not yet talked to her children, Sean and Caitlin, about her breaking up with AJ. Sean was studying ecology in a faraway university and Caitlin was very busy taking care of her son Trey and her husband Cole; Olivia clearly did not want to bother them with her own problems. Although Cate's husband was incidentally AJ's son, she doubted that the betrayer had informed his son about his newly-found lover. In the same way, she doubted Bette had already told her daughter Emily – Sean's girlfriend – about the news. So that nobody knew… for the time being that is. With family members who date people from only one other family (so to speak), news should travel fast.
Presently, Olivia was like a ship in a bottle, which does not seem to fit through its neck, and seems to sit ill at ease in the transparent container that surrounds it. The question about how to get the ship out undamaged blends with the mystery of how the boat ended up there in the first place. In other words, she was at a loss, both literally and figuratively speaking. Like the small ship imprisoned in its bottle, she was suffocating. She needed to confide in someone. She used to cry on Bette's shoulder but how could she do this now ?